Coffee Run: Maple Leaf Gardens, from scalding to serenity

Coffee Run: Maple Leaf Gardens, from scalding to serenity

In Coffee Run, Dave Bidini tastes the city one coffee shop at a time. This week, he’s at the Mattamy Homes Athletic Centre, formerly known as Maple Leaf Gardens.

As a child, coffee seemed an implausible and unlikeable drink. Bitter and frothless, its scent dominated the mornings of my youth like a thug pushing his way into the door frame. The drink was dead-eyed black and absurdly hot, covered neither in swirls nor foam nor chocolate bits, and fizzless, too, the most important signifier for something dour and lacking in fun.

Men and women grew serious while drinking it. Miners and cowboys, too. Coffee was like medicine for grown-ups. Emotional medicine. It still is, only now, I understand why.

I hated coffee for another reason: a woman once spilled it down my back at Maple Leaf Gardens. We were standing for the national anthem when, I suppose, she became entranced by the singing, loosening the grip on her Styrofoam cup so that it tipped forwards, sending the hot drink down my 10-year-old neck and collar. Right before “from far and wide,” I yelped a terrible yelp, my small voice piercing the standing silence of the crowd. The woman was ashen; my father livid. I dried myself off in the washroom but my coat smelled of the horrible grown-up beverage for most of Grades Five and Six.

This incident notwithstanding, Maple Leafs Gardens has always been a good place for me. Probably a great place. A few weeks ago, I was invited to skate in its retro-fitted rebuild — the Mattamy Homes Athletic Centre — with one of my longstanding recreational hockey teams, the Gas Station Islanders, born a decade and a half ago from Gas Station Studios on Toronto Island.

Walking through the tall glass doors at the front of the building with my hockey bag wheeling behind me, the hot coffee incident was buried deep in my memory. After turning to stand in front of the tall black and white photographs that museum the walls of the old rink, every gig, every game and every date was conjured, and despite the profound silence of all that wasn’t there — the yowling crowds and juiced amps and excited voices of city people pouring inside — the place felt familiar. My first — and lasting — impression of the new construct is that Ryerson University has executed the renovations heroically. Factor in the brow of the new Image Arts Building hanging over Lake Devo, and the school has reimagined the dirty city core as a place of motion and intellect.

I rode the escalator to the second floor: more windows, as well as great lengths of the red interior as it existed in 1933, the year the Gardens was built. Turning to ride a second moving staircase to the rink level, I found a small cafe with a few tables and a long counter selling power bars, energy drinks, muffins and, of course, coffee.

That’s when I remembered how it felt to be splashed with the woman’s hot drink while standing for the national anthem in 1973. It’s also how I ended up buying an industrial-natured coffee in a brown cup with a plastic lid from a young blonde woman in volleyball shorts (the Mattamy — or new Gardens — is also the home to ball courts, gymnasiums and fitness centres). I held in the cup in my free hand, continuing my ascent.

In the old Gardens, you’d walk in off Carlton Street to see the south end of the rink exposed behind a sheet of Plexiglas. If the Leafs or their opposition happened to be practising, visitors would be greeted with pucks screaming towards them from the north. It was the last truly open NHL venue in North America. Many times, I’d walk into the building, and, instead of heading to the ticket windows, I’d hop an escalator or climb a staircase into the rink and take a seat along with the scouts, managers, players’ families watching the Leafs’ skate. No one ever bothered me because our society hadn’t yet slid into the kind of neurosis that requires us to protect and conceal everything at all times, unless you can afford a peek, and then, well, we can talk.

There was no security at old MLG. No barricades or metal detecting gates. The first time I took my girlfriend there, she told me, while sitting in the greens: “I feel safe here.”

I spent the night before my wedding standing in front of the penalty box singing O Canada in tuxedos with my band-mates, the Leafs and Nordiques lined up along the blueline watching.

I saw Rush on their Farewell to Kings tour; Max Webster on New Year’s Eve. I met Wendel Clark for the first time during a visit there after most of the seats had been torn out. All of this coursed through my head as I approached the ice surface, which glimmered under the old Gardens’ roof, blasted white and preserved in its original design. I sucked my coffee through a lip in the plastic top. It tasted good and strong. Emotional medicine.

National Post

Dave Bidini is a Toronto author and musician. His most recent book A Wild Stab For It: This is Game Eight From Russia, is in bookstores now.